President Dwight D. Eisenhower (center) with T. Keith Glennan (left) and Hugh Dryden (right).

WASHINGTON, DC (NASA PR) — Although NASA is best known for 60 years of engineering and scientific achievements, it originally came into being as a matter of national security. After the Soviets flew the first two Sputniks in 1957 and Sputnik 3 in 1958, the U.S. government saw space as important new political, if not military, battlefield and began to lay the course for a long-term space plan.

“It was almost as if a bomb had fallen” on Capitol Hill, Congressional staffer Eilene Galloway said in a 2000 oral history interview, “because we were so surprised that the Soviet Union was first. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had space projects in the International Geophysical Year, but our project was very small. It was a satellite that weighed a little more than three pounds, and the Soviet satellite [weighed 184 pounds and] really opened up outer space as the new environment, added to land, sea and air.”

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WASHINGTON (NASA PR) — From 2018 through 2022, NASA is marking a series of important milestones – the 60^th anniversary of the agency’s founding by Congress in 1958, and the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo missions that put a dozen Americans on the Moon between July 1969 and December 1972.

Celebrations already are under way. Some are complete, some are scheduled in the coming months, and some are still being planned.

July 29 will mark 60 years since President Dwight D. Eisenhower established NASA as a U.S. government agency by signing Public Law 58-568, the National Aeronautics and Space Act. The act consolidated several federal and military research organizations, including the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, under one agency.

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